The Ancient North Siberians left their trace in the genomes of later northeastern Siberians like the Kolyma1 individual, and through those later populations in the ancestry of Native Americans.

But they left it as a component, a percentage, a detectable signature — not as a standalone lineage that anyone could point to and say: these people today are the Ancient North Siberians.

From a certain perspective, this is the norm rather than the exception in deep human prehistory.

Many of the populations that ancient DNA research has revealed were previously unknown precisely because they did not persist in recognizable form.

The Ancient North Siberians join a growing catalog of such populations: the Ancient North Eurasians, the Basal Eurasians, the Eastern Hunter-Gatherers, the Ancient Ancestral South Indians — all populations identified through the genetic analysis of ancient specimens, all previously invisible to science because they had been absorbed into later genetic mosaics without leaving a recognizable modern population as their primary legacy.